Web Conferencing Reviews

Late last month we discussed Vidyo’s steps toward commercializing web conferencing by bringing their technology to university campuses, and recently PGi announced a partnership with AVI-SPL that will meet a similar goal. AVI-SPL is proud of its status as a global integrator of audio visual systems and services, and through this new partnership their customers can access PGi’s audio, web, and event- collaboration services.

PGi’s collaboration with AVI-SPL isn’t necessarily bringing video conferencing to the masses the way companies like Vidyo and ViVu are, but it will make the technology more prevalent. PGi’s CTO, David Guthrie, noted that “video is top of mind with our customers and speeds up decision making in a more competitive business climate.” Guthrie has a point—the economic downturn meant budget cuts that largely abolished travel disbursements and left video conferencing nothing but room to grow in the enterprise. A large number of companies discovered during this period that video conferencing was possibly always the better solution to meetings and collaboration, and now it’s becoming necessary to survival.

An indication of how mandatory video conferencing is for survival is that PGi’s customers’ requests are the driving force behind this new partnership—a customer list that includes 90% of the Fortune 500. Of course, many large enterprises already have video conferencing systems, but PGi and AVI-SPL—like so many other conferencing solutions providers these days—want to create a program that’s accessible and doesn’t mean users have to wrap their heads around multiple technologies. It’ll be interesting to see what these two churn out, and how their competitors in enterprise respond.

We recently learned that Citrix would be investing training- and education-related products, and that the corporate-education market will be burgeoning by 2014 at $1.6 billion. Well another videoconferencing facilitator, Vidyo, is banking on the profitability of another kind of education, and is taking their product to college campuses.

Last week, the New Jersey based company announced VidyoCampus: high-definition videoconferencing for university settings.  Vidyo made waves earlier this year when they released their cost-effective room systems—the endpoints start at $6,995 and the entire investment adds up to about $25,000 – $30,000)—and as their videoconferencing technology is based on lightweight software clients, it can be delivered through an outside service provider and is all the more convenient. Vidyo’s technology also allows for multipoint conferencing and doesn’t require the latest technology.

A big part of the reason Vidyo has garnered so much attention is that their price points portend the commercialization of videoconferencing systems, and this new move to target colleges makes them even more accessible. University users can use Vidyo services without making any capital investment—instead, they’ll buy site licenses based on the number of enrolled students. Northwestern University is an early adopter, and can use the systems in classrooms across campus.

The system is noted to have particular benefits for medial campuses, as remote controlled endpoints can allow easy viewing of medical procedures, and Northwestern’s IT Director at the their surgery department conjectures the system could help in fighting epidemics by allowing doctors to easily reach out to their colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control.

The cheapest license for VidyoCampus is $50,000 for a campus with 5,000 students, so there’s a pretty penny to be made here. It’s really interesting that Vidyo has taken the educational properties of videoconferencing and applied them beyond the richest—i.e. corporate—markets.

The beginning of 2010 has been eventful—or at the very least, promising—for Citrix Systems. At the end of January, their Q4 earnings report showed profit was up, and this week, their Citrix Online division announced the release of an online training solution called GoToTraining.

First, the money news. Citrix’s fourth quarter profits rose 47%, and they posted higher revenue both globally and across all its businesses. But, as has been a trend with many tech companies lately, even though Citrix exceeded expectations, shares were down 4.2% to $40.20. Things are still on the up and up, however, and the release of GoToTraining is undoubtedly only the beginning of Citrix’s accomplishments for 2010.

Online training has long been one of web conferencing’s biggest boons, so it’s a smart move on Citrix’s part to extend their popular GoToMeeting platform to include teaching functionalities. In the press release announcing the new product, Citrix Online’s general manager, Brett Caine, noted they’re hoping to draw some of the companies that will be increasing their investments as the economy recovers, saying that as businesses begin hiring and training more, “whether for product education, compliance, internal policies or customer-facing expertise, every business will be seeking ways to train their work force to improve productivity and enhance their value proposition.”

GoToTraining will offer users—among other things—full-service registration, and a content library and material distribution function for trainers (allowing them to easily adjust their curricula). The platform will also offer modern web conferencing staples like polls and tests, and the testing options offered will let trainers asses the attendees’ knowledge prior to sessions, as well as gauge retention of course material during and after sessions.

Some research given in the press release indicates that the web conferencing market for educational and corporate training will grow to $1.6 billion by 2014—an 11.5% compound annual rate from $678.1 million in 2009. The recession had terrible effects on many industries to be sure, but in a lot of ways it gave the video conferencing market a boost, businesses that cut travel and training costs with using online conferencing products will continue to rely on those goods after downturn. The education/training market will likely be big for web conferencing in the next couple years or so, and Citrix will certainly not be the only one to target it aggressively. We look forward to seeing what Citrix’s competitor—well-known and lesser-known—release.

Within the next few years, the majority of mobile phone users will own smartphones. As of now, we tend to think of the iPhone as the “hip” smartphone, the BlackBerry as the original enterprise phone of waning prestige, and the Androids and Google’s Nexus One phones as potential iPhone usurpers. In America at least, the other smartphones on the market don’t have much presence, and the ones seeming to offer the most bells and whistles take the cake.

This week, Citrix announced they’re teaming up with Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs) to bring another dazzling smartphone program to the market—which will transform devices into the “Nirvana Phone.” The phone will combine Citrix receiver client software with OK Labs’ virtual machine technology, and will let users access their virtualized desktops from any location. The idea behind the device is to use smartphones as thin clients that will be able to dock with a display, keyboard, and mouse.

The Nirvana Phone architecture sounds like an amazing extension of the mobile device. Laptop and desktop computers will always be the ideal for working, but the Nirvana Phone will certainly benefit enterprise users on the go. The Nirvana Phone’s conferencing capabilities weren’t articulated, but Citrix’s hand in the matter is auspicious. While this isn’t necessarily a drawback, one issue is that ideal visualization usage is with a monitor via HDMI and a keyboard and mouse via USB—not an impossible fix, but doesn’t make a ton of headway in terms of easily moving extensive work tasks away from laptops.

Nirvana Phone technology will be integrated to smartphones within 12 to 18 months. Exact prices are unknown, but phones leveraging the architecture will reportedly not cost significantly more than other smartphones. Demo below:

When we noted back in November that videoconferencing was becoming more and more of a consumer product, we mentioned Hackensack, NJ-based Vidyo as one of the smaller fish that would be giving companies like Cisco and Logitech a run for their money. Yesterday, Vidyo announced their new telepresence system, called VidyoRoom HD-220: a high-definition, room-based videoconferencing system with a price that will certainly make Cisco disciples rethink their systems.

There are a number of variables in play—from the price of bandwidth to the relevance of legacy videoconferencing systems—that are helping newer videconferencing companies take flight. Bandwidth is getting cheaper and cheaper as conferencing technology continues to improve, which is a start. Larger companies can benefit from this as well, but companies like Vidyo that have smaller product lines are much nimbler in this type of market. Complete telepresence solutions from videoconferencing giants easily cost $250,000, and even then the endpoints might have components that already are, or will soon be irrelevant.

VidyoRoom HD-220 sells for about a tenth of the cost of a high-end telepresence platform: the endpoint starts at $6,995, and with the addition of HD cameras and screens, audio, and the Vidyo router, it adds up to about $25,000 – $30,000. Reviewers have noted that Vidyo’s system doesn’t offer the same sophistication of a Cisco system, but the general opinion is that the product is much more mature than its price suggests.

Questions about Vidyo’s quality tend to stem from their source of transportation: the public Internet. But company execs claim that their technology minimizes latency and packet loss. Either way, they’ve had some pretty substantial success, and are reportedly looking at mobile outlets next.

IBM’s Lotusphere conference is taking place in Orlando, and news from it proves Big Blue is putting some serious force behind LotusLive, their cloud collaboration platform. Last week, Panasonic announced LotusLive would replace Microsoft Exchange at their offices, and the platform will soon be courting Google users it seems, as they’ve announced plans for a new generation of the product that has been described as Google Wave-esque.

Collaboration platforms in general are gaining ground, not just LotusLive, but they’re the ones making the big splash this week, and having the might of IBM only adds to the certainty of collaboration software becoming a corporate mainstay. Online collaboration platforms share many traits with CRM systems, and sometimes cloud collaboration has appeared to encroach on the CRM space.

That’s why it’s worth considering what online collaboration platforms will do the web conferencing segment in the long run. There are number of companies dealing almost exclusively in collaboration platforms, like Jive Social Business Software, and productivity software heavyweights like Oracle and Microsoft bring something to the table as well. However, while pretty much all online collaboration suites offer instant messaging and chat services, few offer video conferencing—for now.

LotusLive’s providing web conferencing tools is a big deal. From the looks of the demo, the conferencing platform isn’t as sophisticated as others offered, but it is a bonus for companies looking for an online collaboration suite, and is also a reason for a few of those companies to eschew the web conferencing vendor search.

However, at Lotusphere today, IBM announced that businesses looking for web conferencing solutions may just consider LotusLive anyways: IBM has expanded LotusLive’s integration partners, and PGi will resell LotusLive Meetings. PGi provides meeting and collaboration solutions, and LotusLive Meetings will be integrated with their audio conferencing platform.

I’m interested to see what happens to video conferencing in enterprise over the next couple years. Many online conferencing solutions are gaining ground and carving niches—like ViVu—but I wonder if we’ll see more movement in mergers and acquisitions as companies seek to beef up their collaboration offerings.

At the end of last year, we took a look at ViVu when they raised $3 million in Series A funding, and given all the hype around their web-based product, we thought we’d check in and see what they’ve been doing since.

In November, people were calling ViVu the “WebEx and GoToMeeting killer,” and while those other two services—both good—haven’t been eradicated, ViVu is still gaining steam. The Wall Street Journal dubbed ViVu’s interactive video-as-a-service (iVaaS) “videoconferencing for the masses,” and other have dubbed it a “participative event platform.”

Without having to download or install any software, ViVu provides chat by audio and video, desktop sharing, and the ability to create and share slideshows. Customers pay either a subscription fee or a per use fee, depending on the user’s needs, but where ViVu’s iVaaS platform has really received credit is its ability to allow thousands of users to interact from anywhere on the internet through a webinar, and turn that into a truly interactive event.  They’ve also received praise for a sleek interface: ViVu dashboard is easily customizable, and conference participants can easily select and scale screens depending on who is speaking.

The ease of interaction ViVu provides is no doubt why some are looking at it as a new element in online collaboration. Online collaboration suites are going to be an emerging software sector this year, and ViVu’s ability to combine conferencing with file sharing and social networking streams is big. We’re excited to see what they can do in 2010.

At the Consumer Electronics Show last week, Panasonic made it clear that we live in the future when they announced two separate partnerships with Skype and DirecTV to provide videoconferencing and 3D viewing, respectively, through their Viera HD TVs.

In the spring of 2010, people buying Panasonic’s Viera Cast HD TVs will be able to use the device for conducting voice and video calls to other Skype subscribers. LG Electronics has penned a similar deal with Skype, and owners of both LG’s and Panasonic’s new HD TVs will be able to use the VoIP provider’s telephony service to make calls via landlines and mobile phones, as well as receive calls over their Skype numbers.

Skype’s technology, though innovative, is not as sophisticated as what’s offered by vendors offering enterprise videoconferencing services, like Cisco, InterCall, and Citrix. However, this is a major coup for the groups wanted to bring videoconferencing to the consumer market, and will undoubtedly have an effect on the enterprise side.

Not only will those purchasing new LG and Panasonic silver screens be able to conduct videoconferencing—after purchasing a specially designed camera—but they will be able to set up conferences with up to 24 participants. The caveat is that conferences will only be up to 720p video quality, and that depends on the user’s internet bandwidth. Enterprise conferences certainly have more needs than a consumer conference, so while businesses might not switch to this new system, it is going to be a great consumer product.

Panasonic’s partnership with DirecTV is to delivery 3D programming through the aforementioned HD TV line, which begs the question: when will we have 3d videoconferencing?

This month, Avistar Communications released their video conferencing predictions for 2010, and we’re going to take a look at them here.

Given the hullabaloo about “Enterprise 2.0” this year, it is highly likely that social networking integrations will become even more popular in the video conferencing sphere. Avistar projects that within the next two years, video conferencing capabilities will be a standard feature in major social networking platforms. The main obstacle, as they see it, is that social networks tend to be text- and link-based, so it will be a challenge for them to store messages on servers.

Another trend speaking to the universality of video conferencing: the ability to join conferences from multiple platforms. There are already a number of vendors offering solutions for smartphones, and Avistar predicts this will lead to a demand for phone-number free conferencing capabilities; users will expect one-click options and the ability to conference from anywhere.

Avistar also predicts there will be a rise in communications-enabled business processes (CEBP). They expect that companies using video conferencing services will be so pleased with the long-term rewards that they’ll integrate conferencing capabilities into existing business applications. This will also lead to more collaborative business environments—“collaboration” being another hot-button item this year. Video conferencing solutions will also continue to be more efficient, with lower power consumption and virtual desktop environments.

Lastly, Avistar believes there will be an increase in free trials. It’s smart of most companies to offer pilot packages, as this encourages more people to try the product at all. However, it could perhaps be difficult if a certain platform requires clunky legacy endpoints.

Cisco could be gaining even more in their acquisition of Tandberg than expected: yesterday Vyopta, a software developer of video and unified collaboration systems, released a software application enabling those using Tandberg MXP and C-series systems to control video and voice calls. The new application manages these videoconferences via an iPhone or an iPod Touch.

Vyopta’s offering, called vControl, will allow users of the aforementioned Tandberg products to initiate video and voice calls, and join those video and audio conferences. There’s an interactive UI to control the Tandberg endpoints, eliminating the need for audio conferencing tabletop endpoints. Features include “click-tocall” dialing from phonebook and call history; control of camera, speaker volume, and viewing layouts; real-time messaging. Furthermore, vControl users can join conferences on any audio or video bridge.

vControl simplifies the user experience, and is certainly a good way to encourage widespread adoption of video conferencing systems. Earlier this year, Fuze Meeting launched a mobile conferencing application, but theirs was perhaps more complex, as it offered file sharing and social network integration, and supported both the iPhone and BlackBerry. Certainly there’ll be more mobile video and audio conferencing solutions to come—given the press Tandberg has received lately, they’re bound to set trends in this sector.